Previous design components for a hover jet VTC were articulated in U.S. Pat. No. 5,666,803, which is hereby incorporated by reference.
Vertical and/or short take-off and landing (V/STOL) is a term used to describe airplanes that are able to take-off or land vertically or on short runways. Vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) describes craft that do not require runways at all. Generally, a V/STOL aircraft needs to be able to hover.
The ability for a V/STOL aircraft to hover relies on an ability to manipulate forces for roll, yaw, and pitch. An ability to control roll, yaw and pitch while hovering is necessary for manned aircraft as well as aircraft models.
One type of manned V/STOL aircraft relies upon jet propulsion, e.g, the Harrier “jump jet”. For aircraft modelers, one approach is to power the model aircraft with a ducted fan driven by a high-speed engine. The engine turns a multi-bladed fan mounted inside a circular housing (the duct), and the fan unit produces thrust which pushes the model through the air. With a ducted fan the entire power plant can be hidden inside most models, thus allowing for the building of realistic replicas of jet aircraft. Further, ducted-fan models have many of the flight characteristics of full-size jet aircraft, offering new challenges to radio-control pilots. An excellent source of background material on ducted-fan aircraft is Building & Flying Ducted-fan RC Aircraft, by Dick Sarpolus, published in 1981 by Kalmback Publishing Co.
Difficulties in achieving hover to horizontal flight have, for the most part, stymied the developers of lightweight remotely controlled aircraft. Only recently was the chasm from vertical to horizontal flight and back successfully traversed. See R/C VTOL Makes History, by John A. Gorham, published in the October 1993 issue of Model Airplane News. However, the VTOL radio-controlled aircraft which first successfully navigated transitory flight looks and behaves a far cry from the sleek and stylish Harrier. The Grumman Electronics Systems' ⅓-scale R/C model of a proposed VTOL aircraft utilized twin rotatable, externally mounted ducted-fan engine and fan combinations employing a vane-control system manipulated by flight-control servos. Though conquering transitory flight, the Grumman project did not provide aircraft modelers with a workable R/C power plant for internal mounting in made-to-scale fighter aircraft models.